Service Learning Required

After studying community service programs, one lesson is clear:
Not many people agree on what a good citizen does.

Interest in government may be down, but volunteer work is up. Studies
show that young people in particular are less inclined than a decade
ago to take an interest in government affairs, while they are far more
likely to be involved in nonpaid community-service projects. Both
contributing to and capitalizing on this phenomenon, school- based
service-learning programs have become increasingly popular, spreading
community-service actions across the nation like points of light at a
planetarium.

Last fall, in an effort to foster a sense of civic duty in
teenagers, the Chicago public school system became the largest district
in the nation requiring students to spend a set number of hours
volunteering in soup kitchens, cleaning up parks, assisting in
hospitals, or monitoring pollution in streams in exchange for the right
to a diploma. Cities such as Atlanta and Washington and the entire
state of Maryland already have similar requirements. And this past
September, Ontario instituted the first province-wide rule in Canada to
oblige students to volunteer for a minimum of 40 hours. A recent study
by the National Center for Education Statistics reveals that 83 percent
of high schools currently offer community-service opportunities
(compared with 27 percent in 1984).

Indeed, by next year, the total number of students in North America
engaged in community service will top 13 million. Why? Because most
agree that schools should encourage good citizenship, and that good
citizenship means helping when help is needed.

But as politicians and pundits as diverse as Bill Clinton and Bill
Bradley, Edward M. Kennedy and George W. Bush, Jesse L. Jackson and
William F. Buckley tout the benefits of youths' serving in their
communities, and as millions of dollars are spent on local and
federally supported school-based service programs, educators from
schoolhouse to statehouse are neglecting to answer the simplest of
questions: In the service of what?

For the past seven years, we have been studying a range of programs
designed to help students be better citizens through community service.
After observing dozens of programs in action, interviewing hundreds of
teachers and students, and analyzing thousands of surveys, one lesson
is clear: Not many people agree on what a good citizen does.

Some programs are based on the belief that good citizens show up to
work on time and pay taxes. In one school in New York, 32 percent of
the students fulfilled their new service requirement by working for one
of the country's largest banks. In another school, close to half the
students "served" in local businesses that included fast-food-
restaurant franchises, stores in the local mall, and a stock
brokerage.

Other educators, in an effort to build consensus, have endorsed the
view that citizenship simply entails acting decently toward the people
around you. Students in those programs pick up litter or help out in
homeless shelters. The principal rationale for the community-service
requirement in Atlanta, for example, was that it would ensure that
students recognized "the responsibility to help others."

Unfortunately, too few of these programs teach students the skills
that citizens of a democracy must have if they are to help shape social
policy on behalf of those in need. Too few of them make students aware
of the difficulties involved in changing the circumstances that lead to
rivers or parks being dirty or to individuals and families being
hungry. Too few of them equip students to pursue legislative remedies
to unjust situations, remedies that can improve society.

When the NCES asked educators to identify the most important goals
for service learning, 53 percent wanted students to become active
community members, 51 percent wanted students to become knowledgeable
community members, 48 percent wanted students to meet real community
needs, and 46 percent wanted to encourage altruism and caring for
others. Those designing the survey did not bother to ask whether a goal
of service learning might be to help students analyze social problems,
their causes, or possible solutions. Indeed, only 19 percent responded
that a primary goal of service learning is to teach critical-thinking
and problem-solving skills. Helpful activity decoupled from social
analysis is the locus of a vast majority of programs.

As the name of the federal legislation to "Serve America" implies,
most of the programs emphasize altruism, charity, and simple
participation. They teach that personal responsibility is the solution
to the nation's problems, that community service is a nice thing to do
instead of politics. This kind of service risks being understood as a
kind of noblesse oblige, a private act of kindness performed by the
privileged that simply reinforces the status quo.

Few programs,
for example, ask students to assess corporate responsibility or
the ways government policies improve or harm society.

Few programs, for example, ask students to assess corporate
responsibility or the ways government policies improve or harm society.
Few programs ask students to examine the history of social movements as
levers for change. It should come as no surprise, then, that service is
often viewed by participants as a desirable alternative to governmental
action and legislative change. Citizenship is emphasized, but the
connection between citizenship, politics, and government legislation is
obscured.

Acts of civic decency are important, but citizenship in a democratic
society requires more than kindness. To become truly effective
citizens, students (especially those in high school) have to learn how
to create, evaluate, criticize, and change public norms, institutions,
and programs. For example, a group in one school studied domestic
violence and led workshops for their peers on how to avoid it. Students
in another school worked with a community center to prevent a dangerous
waste-disposal plant from being built in their community and helped
create a commission to promote equitable placement of future sites. We
should applaud these bold efforts. These teachers and service-learning
organizers use the power of experiences helping others to teach
students to address complex social problems and their causes.

Furthermore, though service-learning programs that teach social and
political analysis are by no means prevalent, there already exist some
promising initiatives. The Surdna Foundations' Effective Citizenry
program, for example, funded 10 curriculum groups across the country
engaged in democratic-values education. In our study of these programs,
we have seen compelling evidence that when service experiences are
combined with rigorous analysis of related social issues, students do
develop the attitudes, skills, and knowledge necessary to respond in
productive ways.

Similarly, in both quantitative and qualitative studies of other
service-learning efforts in Chicago and New York, we found that when
participants examined difficult problems in society related to social
and economic injustice, their commitment to become involved and to seek
solutions to these problems increased.

What do students learn through their community service? If students
serve the homeless and enjoy the rewards of volunteering but do not
study the various causes of homelessness, what lessons are they
learning? If they ladle soup for those who are hungry but do not
explore the conditions that brought individuals and families to their
counter, is there a risk? We think so. Volunteerism will always be an
important support for our society and for our humanity. It will also
always be insufficient.

Only through collective action as citizens can we begin to address
the fundamentally important and difficult challenges we face as a
society. If the focus on service downplays or distracts attention from
systemic causes and solutions, far from helping, the current emphasis
that service-learning requirements place on volunteerism may lead
students to embrace an impoverished conception of their civic
potential. When the emphasis is on helping but not on the factors that
create the need for help, we risk teaching students that need is
inevitable, that alleviating momentary suffering but not its origins is
the only expression of responsible citizenship.

What kind of society does service learning lead students to work
toward? What values do different community-service activities promote?
Will a service-learning requirement teach students to work for a more
responsive society or simply to accept the status quo?

As millions of dollars are spent on school-based service programs
and as a growing number of school districts, cities, states, and
provinces require students to perform community service to receive a
diploma, these questions merit the immediate attention of those who
take seriously the idea that school-based community service can be an
important part of educating citizens in a democracy.

Joel Westheimer is an assistant professor of education and a
fellow of the Center for the Study of American Culture and Education at
New York University in New York City. Joseph Kahne is an associate
professor of educational leadership at Mills College in Oakland,
Calif.

Joel Westheimer is an assistant professor of education and a fellow of
the Center for the Study of American Culture and Education at New York
University in New York City. Joseph Kahne is an associate professor of
educational leadership at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.

From Quest International, links to service-learning
research articles.

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